Tuesday, November 24, 2009

In consideration of the many family dinners that will occur over the next few days of the Thanksgiving holiday, for the second year in a row Pallimed is hosting (along with several other medical bloggers) a guest post from Engage with Grace and the One Slide Project. This post will stay at the top of Pallimed from Tuesday the 24th until Sunday the 29th. You can also join the Engage with Grace group on Facebook.

Have a safe and meaningful Thanksgiving!

Some conversations are easier than others

Last Thanksgiving weekend, many of us bloggers participated in the first documented “blog rally” to promote Engage With Grace – a movement aimed at having all of us understand and communicate our end-of-life wishes.

It was a great success, with over 100 bloggers in the healthcare space and beyond participating and spreading the word. Plus, it was timed to coincide with a weekend when most of us are with the very people with whom we should be having these tough conversations – our closest friends and family.

Our original mission – to get more and more people talking about their end of life wishes – hasn’t changed. But it’s been quite a year – so we thought this holiday, we’d try something different.

A bit of levity.

At the heart of Engage With Grace are five questions designed to get the conversation started. We’ve included them at the end of this post. They’re not easy questions, but they are important.

To help ease us into these tough questions, and in the spirit of the season, we thought we’d start with five parallel questions that ARE pretty easy to answer:

Silly? Maybe. But it underscores how having a template like this – just five questions in plain, simple language – can deflate some of the complexity, formality and even misnomers that have sometimes surrounded the end-of-life discussion.

So with that, we’ve included the five questions from Engage With Grace below. Think about them, document them, share them.

Over the past year there’s been a lot of discussion around end of life. And we’ve been fortunate to hear a lot of the more uplifting stories, as folks have used these five questions to initiate the conversation.

One man shared how surprised he was to learn that his wife’s preferences were not what he expected. Befitting this holiday, The One Slidewww.engagewithgrace.org now stands sentry on their fridge.

Wishing you and yours a holiday that’s fulfilling in all the right ways.

(To learn more please go to www.engagewithgrace.org. This post was written by Alexandra Drane and the Engage With Grace team. )

Pallimed: A Hospice & Palliative Medicine Blog Founded June 8, 2005.
This blog is a labor of love whose only mission is educational. Its content is strictly the work of its authors and has no affiliation with or support from any organization or institution, including the authors' employers. All opinions expressed on this blog are solely those of its authors.
In addition, all opinions expressed on this blog are probably wrong, and should never be taken as medical advice in any form.